Handheld or mobile computers are widely used, such as in different field mobility environments. For example, these computing devices may be used by mobile field service and transportation workers to allow different types of mobile operations, such as in-field computing, radio frequency identifier (RFID) scanning, barcode scanning, and communication with remote external devices, among others.
For RFID scanning, RFID scanners may use one or more RFID methods for different applications, including for smart cards, supporting maintenance tasks, identification badges, tracking objects in manufacturing, retail inventory management, etc. An RFID tag can be attached, e.g., to an inventory object. An RFID apparatus can be configured with an RFID reading device including one or more antennas to read the memory of an RFID tag attached to an inventory object.
The RFID apparatus may be a handheld device with integrated RFID reading capabilities that can read RFID tags from a range of distances, such as during a retail floor inventory operation. However, one may not know whether all physical structures such as retail floor fixtures (and by extension, all items with attached RFID tags) in a given department have been inventoried and the subsequent determination of the location of a particular RFID tagged inventory item can be difficult. For example, it can be quite time consuming for the user of an RFID apparatus to perform retail floor inventory location operations because conventional RFID devices may only be capable of providing a coarse or approximate location of a particular RFID tag coupled with an item, and in some instances cannot provide even coarse location information.
Thus, while one benefit of RFID, compared with traditional barcode scanning, is that the user does not need line of sight to the tag in order to collect data, the absence of the one to one correspondence that the line of sight gives the user creates a problem when the user is searching for a particular tagged item. Moreover, as RFID tags become more ubiquitous, it is becoming more difficult to know what tags are actually being read.
There is no way to know where tags are specifically, and as such, there is a need to be able to tell which RFID tags the handheld reader is pointing at.